“I have something you want,” his hand touched the package. He drifted away into the front room, his voice remote and blurred. “You have something I want . . . five minutes here . . . an hour someplace else . . . two . . . four . . . eight . . . Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. . . . Every day die a little. . . . It takes up The Time. ..
He moved back into the kitchen, his voice loud and clear: “Five years a piece. Nobody gives a better deal on the street.” He put a finger on the dividing line below the boy’s nose. “Right down the middle.”
“Mister, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You will, baby . . . in time.”
“OK. So what do I do?”
“You accept?”
“Yeah, like . . .” He glanced at the package. “Whatever . . . I accept.”
The boy felt a silent black clunk fall through his flesh.
The Sailor put a hand to the boy’s eyes and pulled out a pink scrotal egg with one closed, pulsing eye. Black fur boiled inside translucent flesh of the egg.
The Sailor caressed the egg with nakedly inhuman hands—black-pink, thick, fibrous, long white tendrils sprouting from abbreviated finger tips. Death fear and Death weakness hit the boy, shutting off his breath, stopping his blood. He leaned against a wall that
seemed to give slightly. He clicked back into junk focus.
The Sailor was cooking a shot. “When the roll is called up yonder we’ll be there, right?” he said, feeling along the boy’s vein, erasing goose-pimples with a gentle old woman finger. He slid the needle in. A red